Alec Baldwin vows to step away from public life

TORONTO — Actor Alec Baldwin said 2013 was “pretty awful” and he is giving up on public life.

“I find myself bitter, defensive, and more misanthropic than I care to admit,” Baldwin wrote in an essay published in New York magazine and posted on Vulture.

“It’s good-bye to public life in the way that you try to communicate with an audience playfully like we’re friends, beyond the work you are actually paid for. I want to go make a movie and be very present for that and give it everything I have, and after we’re done, then the rest of the time is mine.”

He took aim at the prevalence of cameras in modern society.

“It used to be you’d go into a restaurant and the owner would say, ‘Do you mind if I take a picture of you and put it on my wall?’ Sweet and simple. Now, everyone has a camera in their pocket,” wrote Baldwin.

“Add to that predatory photographers and predatory videographers who want to taunt you and catch you doing embarrassing things. You’re out there in a world where if you do make a mistake, it echoes in a digital canyon forever.”

Baldwin also defended himself against charges he is homophobic.

“Look, I work in show business. I am awash in gay people, as colleagues and as friends. I’m doing Rock of Ages one day, making out with Russell Brand,” he said.

“Soon after that, I’m advocating with Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Cynthia Nixon for marriage equality. I’m officiating at a gay friend’s wedding. I’m not a homophobic person at all. But this is how the world now sees me.”

Baldwin shared fond memories of working on 30 Rock and said he was looking forward to doing the Broadway play Orphans.

“Then Shia LaBeouf showed up,” he wrote. (LaBeouf was later fired and replaced by Ben Foster.)

Baldwin’s essay also took on Anderson Cooper, TMZ’s Harvey Levin and MSNBC, which recently cancelled his talk show. He called Rachel Maddow a “phony.”

“Now I loathe and despise the media in a way I did not think possible,” he wrote. “I used to engage with the media knowing that some of it would be adversarial, but now it’s superfluous at best and toxic at its worst.”

Baldwin apologized to anyone he offended. But, he added, “the solution for me now is: I’ve lived this for 30 years, I’m done with it.”